This is very powerful because your blog posts will be broadcast to the activity …Now, I couldn’t find a WordPress plugin that could post directly to my… First, download the TwitPress plugin and install the TwitPress plugin on your blog. 2. …. You can import your Word Press blog’s RSS feed into your Facebook Notes page.

As a blogger who has authored several successful books with publishers, and who works on WordPress.com, I recently self-published a book based entirely on posts from my blog. I wanted to see what I could learn, and I’m here to share it all with you.

1. How do you shape a blog into a book?

This is the wrong way to start. A book is a different reading experience than a blog, and to “shape” a blog into a book assumes words are like clay, where you can shove them into any shape you like. A book is a longer reading experience, and every chapter, or every page, needs to line up in a readable way with the others. It will take some effort to rework material written for a blog to fit well together as a book. Don’t start with the assumption you’ll include every single post on your blog, or keep them in the chronological order they were written.

The first step is to make two lists: possible posts and possible concepts. You might discover a book concept that’s strong, but you only have 10 or 12 posts that fit. That’s ok. You can always choose to write more. Of course the theme of your entire blog could be the theme for a book, but consider other concepts too.

I went back to the beginning and made a list of posts that might be good enough to include. I made a separate list of possible book concepts. One concept I saw in some of my posts was intelligent provocation: asking big questions and offering intelligent and entertaining answers. I filtered the list based on that concept, and arrived at 45 possible posts. Then I hired an editor to help refine the list, and the result was 30 posts that, while all written independently, fit together into an excellent read.

There are services like Blurb or Blog2print that will take your WordPress.com blog and build a book from it. If your WordPress blog is self-hosted, and not on WordPress.com, you might take a look at Anthologize, a plugin that automates the process of converting your blog into an e-book. But these services do nothing to shape your work into a great read. No software can do this for you. There is an enormous distance between a ‘book’ and a ‘book someone will enjoy reading’ and that distance is closed only by your hard work.

Plan to take a draft version of your book and ask people to read it. Ask for feedback on improving the order of posts, or which posts don’t fit. You’ll notice people expect tighter and more careful writing in a book, compared to reading posts online. It’s acting on this feedback that makes the difference between a book that feels like a book, and a book that feels like a bunch of random posts thrown together. Revise posts, or write new material, to develop the book into a singular strong narrative. I asked for volunteers on my blog for people to give feedback on the drafts and their input was a key part of making the book so strong.

2. How do you actually (self) publish a book?

To go the traditional route, you’ll need to reach out to publishers or agents and try to find one that’s interested. This takes significant effort beyond writing the book itself. In all cases, traditional or self-published, the hardest part is writing and editing an excellent book. If you’re dedicated to your book, self-publishing can allow you to focus your energy on making the book better, rather than in searching for someone to give you a chance you can give yourself.

If you already have a well edited manuscript, you are most of the way there: the technical parts of self-publishing are surprisingly easy. You take your complete manuscript, after it has been copyedited and reviewed by an editor, and convert it to a PDF. With a PDF in hand, there are many services that will convert your PDF to a print or digital book for you.

For Mindfire, I used Lightning Source for the print edition, and a service called BookBaby to manage the digital editions. These services list the book on amazon.com, and it can be purchased like any other book on amazon.com, including Kindle, iBook and other digital versions. It doesn’t cost much: maybe a few hundred dollars. If you choose to only produce a digital version, it can be much cheaper.

The more work you do, the cheaper the services are. If you are willing to hire your own editor and cover designer, or do those tasks yourself, and take care of details like getting an ISBN number, you can user services like Lightning Source or CreateSpace to simply print and distribute he book. But if you want to hire people to help you, services like CreateSpace and Lulu.com let you pay them to take care of many steps on your behalf.

3. Why would people buy a book if the content is free on the blog?

The rise of the iPad and Kindle have proven the demand for longer reading experiences, experiences longer than what the web provides. A compilation of your work offers a deeper experience than what people get through your blog alone. Blogs are fantastic for small to medium length reading experiences, but to consume 40 or 50 posts without interruption, posts that are chosen to fit together on a specific theme, you need something else. A book is a better experience for this kind of continuous reading.

A book gives you an object demonstrating your talents to potential clients, business partners or anyone in the world you wish to impress. Since a book is often perceived as being a greater accomplishment than having a blog, it can be a stronger invitation to a new reader to give your work a try. It also allows your fans and friends to buy copies of your book to give to their friends as gifts: it helps them help you spread word of your work.

It’s counterintuitive, but giving the book away for free for a time helps a new book, and your blog, tremendously.

First it rewards your regular readers – who deserves a free copy more than your regular readers? The free give-away helps enlist them to reach out to their networks to bring more people to your blog for the first time. I gave Mindfire away for free for 48 hours, and had over 10,000 people download the book. It’s true my blog is popular, but many of those downloads were by people who had never heard of me before. My great fans on my site helped spread word on twitter and Facebook of my free offer, spreading my reach for future blog posts and books. I still give 1/3rd of the book away for free as a preview for anyone who wants to give it a try.

5. What’s the first step to take?

You’re a blogger: start by blogging about it. Ask your readers if they’re interested in helping you work on a book. Post your list of book concepts and see what they think. Perhaps there’s an author, editor or designer who reads your work that can lend their expertise. Take a careful look at the work you’ve already written and start thinking about what concepts might match.

Have questions about converting your blog into a book? Leave a comment.

Publish To WordPress From Microsoft Word 2007

I must say that I absolutely love the entire Office 2007 suite!! Office 2003 was a good product, everything worked as you would expect (except for Outlook which a bloated piece of crap) – but everything in Office 2007 is improved and makes productivity so much more efficient! Here is one example, I created this very post through Word 2007 – from the first keystroke to publishing, I never opened my browser! And the best thing about it, Word 2007 actually produces clean HTML – unlike Word 2003 which sticks in its own markup language, which creates more info for the browser to have to deal with and ultimately ignore, creating longer page load times.

Why Bother

You get an offline editor that has fantastic spelling and grammar checking!

Info

Setting up Word to publish was very easy and will work with Windows XP and Vista and it only takes a few dialogs to set it all up! Also, you can have more than one blog set up under multiple blog systems. The following are supported:

Windows Live Spaces

Blogger

SharePoint blog

Community Server

TypePad

WordPress

Other

Setup

To start, click the round Office button, Publish, then Blog.

Since this is the first time were setting this up, click the Register Now button in the Register a Blog Account dialog.

In the New Blog Account dialog, select WordPress from the drop down menu.

In the New WordPress Account dialog, you get to fill in all of the important information. In the Blog Post URL, fill in your blog’s address; if you’ve installed WordPress somewhere other than your site’s root, then you need to specify that here. Say you’ve installed WordPress at: http://example.com/blog then the URL would be http://example.com/blog/xmlrpc.php.Now enter your username and password. These would be the values that you use to log into WordPress!If you would like Word to upload pictures for you, we can set that up by clicking the Picture Options button.

The Picture Options dialog is a little tricky, so pay attention! You can choose to have Word publish images to directly to you blog provider (think a wordpress.com account) or to your server (if you or a host is serving your site). I’m hosting this site, so I chose the My own server option[1]. In the Upload URL text box, type in the address as so: ftp://username:password@URL.com/folder. So, let’s say that this is your information:

WordPress Username: Bob

WordPress Password: monkey123

WordPress URL: boblovesmonkeys.com

Folder: images

Then you would type: ftp://bob:monkey123@boblovesmonkeys.com/images – notice the colon between the username and password and that there is not “http://” in the URL.

And the source would read: http:// boblovesmonkeys.com/images

If you upload your images to the default location (from within posts), you can set that up as: ftp://user:pass@URL.com/full/path/to/wp-content/uploads
And the Source URL would be http://URL.com/wp-content/uploads.

Click OK and you’re all done!

Create Your First Blog Entry

Now, you can see the Ribbon has changed to blogging mode! You can Publish, Publish as draft, Insert your categories (yep, it will download all of your categories!) [2], Open existing posts, set up new blogs and even insert HTML objects like pictures, links, charts and so much more! You can even create drop shadows and other image effects!

After you are done, you can simply click the Publish button and your post will be live!

Options

If you want to take advantage of WordPress’s Time Stamp feature, publish the post as a draft and then go online and set the time and publish it from there!

[1] The problem with having Word upload your images, is that it names the images in this format: date_postid_description.ext. For example an image would be called 070207_Word_1.gif and Word tries to optimize the images before uploading them and can make them look too lossy. It would be nice to be able to configure the image quality, but you can’t have it all!

[2] To set more the one category, click the Insert Category button again.

A solution to “Word cannot register your account” for Word blogging

As it turns out, it’s a setting in WordPress’ Dashboard. I don’t recall seeing this setting a few years ago when I registered my blogs, so it might be something new they added to make things less hit-or-miss. In any case, it worked! Here’s the fix.

At the bottom of the left column, under Dashboard, click on Settings. This will expand the list of settings sections.

Click Writing.

Under Remote Publishing, enable XML-RPC. If you think you’ll ever use Atom, then enable it, too, just for the heck of it.

The Edit Posts page includes options for displaying posts by label, and for applying or removing labels on batches of posts. To get there, visit the Posting | Edit Posts tab, or just click the Manage Posts link on your dashboard.

This page has all labels in use by this blog listed on the left-hand side. Each individual post also has its particular labels marked in green next to its title. By default, posts with all labels are shown.

(Note: You’ll only see the labels here if you have at least one post already labeled. You can label an individual post on the posting form.)

If you click the label links on the left-hand side, the list of posts will be narrowed down to show only posts with that particular label.

Each post has a checkbox next to it. If you want to make a change to multiple posts, first check all the ones that you want to affect. Then select an option from the “Label Actions…” menu.

This menu includes options for adding any of your labels to the select posts, as well as for removing labels already on the posts. You can also select “New Label…” if you want to create a label that you don’t already have.

If you want to edit a label across all posts, you can do so by removing it and then adding a new one. For instance, say you want to change the label “Books” to “Reading.” Just follow these steps:

Click the “Books” label link on the left side of the page. Click the “Select All” link at the top of the list of posts. From the “Label Actions…” menu, choose “Remove label > Books.” From the “Label Actions…” menu, choose “Apply label > New Label…” Enter “Reading” as your new label. (If you already have some posts with the label “Reading,” you can simply apply that label, without making a new label.)

If you are a current blogger on Blogspot and you register a custom domain the word ‘blogspot’ will automatically be removed from the blogspot.com URL address giving your blog/web pages a more personalized and professional appeal.

As a background information, Blogger is only a free publishing platform, and you need a domain to work with it. To provide free blogging experience, Blogger uses Blogspot as the free domain. So when you sign up with Blogger, you can get a free domain like http://www.example.blogspot.com.

Now, if you want to remove the .blogspot.com from your address, here are some methods to do it :

Use your own domain, move your current blog to your own domain. For this, you can get a more professional web address like http://www.yourname.com. However, if you choose this method, you need to pay some money for such address.

If you want a free domain (but not blogspot), you can use www.biz.ly and others. They will provide you with a free domain (or domains). Then you can move your blog to this free address.

However, there are some drawbacks of doing this. Blogger (Blogspot) provide their users unlimited traffic and storage, and the domains above do not. Each of them will have some specific bandwidth and storage limits for you to deal with. In addition, you have to pay some money for them.